The person you see Photoshopped (pasted) into the photograph of my home office is NOT ME. Why it isn’t me will become obvious when you read the following story regarding a case of blatantly pathetic commercial copyright infringement committed by AwareBear Computers (Pittsford Rochester New York, owned by Andre Leite Alves).

The company, “Aware Bear” (home theater solutions, apple repair, pc repair, web design, and wedding photography), owned and run by Mr. Andre Leite Alves (not “Arthur Leite” which was used as the name to sign previous communications in a miserable attempt to ensure a court summons would be drawn up for the wrong name) claims to have been in business since 1993, has over 15 years of computer experience, and is serving the area of Rochester, NY (New York) and Pittsford, NY. Evidently, they haven’t learned much about legal matters and copyrights during that time.

AwareBear has created, printed, and distributed brochures using the above image (an unauthorized derivative work of my copyrighted material, as the actual owner of the property pictured as well as me being the photographer of the image). In addition a PDF version was available online at AA Computers USA (a former, rumored to have failed company that involved Mr. Andre Leite Alves and where a different website for Aware Bear is hosted, not to be confused with other businesses by that name for which actual business licenses could be found). After AwareBear was contacted regarding their blatant violation of copyright they removed the PDF from the website BUT claimed that the brochure “never went to print”. This response was signed “Arthur Leite”.

In my initial letter to AwareBear (at the time I decided not to involve lawyers yet other than the general consulting call) I advised them to consult with an attorney. The response stated that they did and was clearly written in great haste; “I am deeply upset thus I have already have spoken with my lawyer” (verbatim, errors aren’t mine). I wonder if the attorney advised their client to LIE, not knowing such a lie could end up being devastating evidence in court. I doubt that a remotely competent attorney would allow their client make irresponsible statements in writing, statements that can be held against you in court and would completely wipe out any defense a lawyer could spin with a dose of imagination.

The mistake that “Arthur” Leite made was not only the copyright infringement for commercial purposes but also made the stupid mistake of assuming that I and my attorneys wouldn’t know any better and only had knowledge of the online PDF. Unfortunately for AwareBear, we did know better because those who contacted me regarding this unauthorized use had in their possession the very printed hardcopies of these brochures.

AwareBear was certainly AWARE that they had printed and distributed these flyers, for example at a job fair for students at Monroe Community College. Once you start distributing flyers you no longer have control over where they might end up and what consequential damages and confusion that may cause. In this case it also causes major embarrassment for AwareBear and its owner Andre Leite Alves, especially considering that I am now publically explaining the situation to my readers and visitors. And from what I can tell, my website has some level of popularity in many tech circles. Then again, I am also known for making understatements. 🙂

In the initial response I got from AwareBear claimed that the image was created by a “university student graphic designer” and that they were “not aware of its copyright”. Legally speaking, not being aware does not absolve one from the legal implications of copyright infringement and any subsequent damages, financial or otherwise, that occur from taking such action. I have dealt with legal cases before where copyrighted material of mine was used in print for commercial purposes and the law was quite clear on that. Crystal clear. If you use material you can’t properly identify you take a risk and sometimes that can be a very dangerous risk that leaves you and your company liable for any and all damages that come forth out of those actions.

Because “Arthur” of Aware Bear already lied to me about the brochure never having been printed I certainly can’t accept anything else that they claim to be honest and truthful. Maybe a student did not create that image and it was only said in order to hopefully defer their own responsibility and liability in this matter. Either way, if a student did create the image and committed the actual theft, AwareBear did not have a contract with said student that includes an indemnification clause and still accepted the results, thereby taking a legal risk of their own free will. This to me indicates that AwareBear conducts their business in a highly unprofessional way.

It is unclear what the purpose of using that image in their brochure was all about, though. On the one hand it implied that AwareBear runs their on-site services through the setup seen in the image. On the other hand it also directly implied that there is an association between me, my business(es), and Aware Bear. And that is most certainly NOT the case. There never was such an association and certainly never will be. Given that the brochure mentions their services like on-site computer maintenance like removing viruses and backing up your data, it implies that I am not capable of doing that myself and need Aware Bear to do that for me.

Ha, they wish. I wouldn’t let them near my data. The nearest they got to my data was by taking it off my website and pasting that guy in there to create a completely falsified and fraudulent reflection of the actual facts. Next to the image they have the words “All Service Done On-Site” and directly underneath the image is a quote that reads “We are dedicated to helping you, facilitating your use of technology and making a difference one customer at a time”. Yeah, well, that customer does NOT include me in any way and very likely in the future they will perhaps only retain ONE customer, at ANY time.

I will keep you all updated on the legal proceedings and further developments of this story. In the meantime, I will gladly share with you what the associates at my attorney’s office have uncovered in an attempt to assess the person and company that acted in this extremely careless way and I will explain why it is seriously foolish to lie in response to legal inquiries that are made.

AwareBear, and its owner Andre Leite Alves, claim to have been in business since 1993. The company AA Computers USA (dot com) has one site for AwareBear while the actual site is yet again different. Nothing wrong with that, except that on one of the two sites the company also claims to provide business web design services.

Would you want your business site to be designed by a company that goes around being careless and unprofessional when it comes to the content they use? What guarantee do you, as a client, have that they will not ‘accidentally’ include stock graphics or material that has not been properly identified, cleared, and/or authorized for use? Would you like to take a chance at being liable for any carelessness on the part of Aware Bear? I wouldn’t.

What’s even more sad is that Andre (“Arthur”) Leite Alves also moonlights as a wedding photographer (according to our information for around $800 for a 12-hour day). A “professional wedding photographer”, as Andre Leite Alves calls himself, with a B.S. (does that stand for bullshit?) degree from RIT in 2001 (and former classes in Brazil) should not be as unprofessional as to steal the photographs of another photographer. That level of theft, also known as copyright infringement, indicates a high level of being unprofessional. Not clearing images created by third parties, if you are the client, is likewise unprofessional and careless. Any photographer worth a dime knows better than that.

Another interesting discovery was that AwareBear has been using so many mailing addresses and locations that it means that Mr. Alves either relocates his home a lot or has other reasons to move around a lot. Maybe Mr. Andre Leite Alves will soon relocate again and adopt the name “Arthur Leite” in an attempt to avoid getting served a court summons. In case he does, feel free to contact me to let me know where he could be found.

It’s maybe also part of the reason why AwareBear never mentions any addresses other than e-mail and their phone number. According to sources, AwareBear doesn’t have an office to speak of and dispatches students to customers to perform their activities on-site, or will have your equipment collected and returned (e.g. they bring it to some other place where someone works on it from their home).

And just to share something else that’s fishy but funny with you all, if you look at previous versions of the AwareBear related websites, you will find that some of their testimonials use the same words like “are part of my success story” but are attributed to completely different individuals and businesses over a different period of time. It sure makes me wonder if those aren’t ALSO IMAGINARY.

What is also made up and very clear, is another bad photo editing job that was done on a picture of a car in the brochure. It has the text/logo of AwareBear on the side of the car but a 2-year old can tell it’s pasted on there after the fact and way too obvious. Perhaps this is the level of quality that is acceptable to AwareBear which would say a lot about the level of quality the company might represent to anyone else. The brochure also claims “Our team is standing by to support you with friendly and honest service you deserve”. I think they might need to consider dropping the word honest in there. Perhaps edit it to reflect the word DISHONEST instead.

That might explain why AwareBear decided to use, print, and distribute the image of my office with a different individual pasted in there. Clearly a deceptive practice that matches the overall sense that this entire company is unprofessional and, I strongly suspect, not to be trusted. I usually have a sharp sense about business matters and everything about this company and its owner screams to me that it’s an inherently untrustworthy operation. Very amateurish, I would say.

I suspect that if a business represents no value, has no value, and is operated in a highly questionable way, the only way to impress potential customers is by using things you falsify and the deception you create in order to misrepresent yourself and your business. Perception is reality, except that the reality of AwareBear does not present much of a good perception at all.

It’s a good thing I’ve got a background in computer graphics since the mid 80’s. It allowed me to instantly notice the badly done “Photoshop” work, otherwise I might have felt compelled to file charges of trespassing and burglary! As a business associate of mine said, “I wouldn’t hire them to do Photoshopping”. I fully agree on that. 🙂

I don’t want to create a whole bunch of blog categories on my site for AwareBear but if I were to do that it would probably include tags for; untrustworthy, liars, thieves, unprofessional, irresponsible, amateurs, unreliable, deceptive, dishonest, inexperienced, reputation, and a whole range of other words along the same lines. Then again, maybe those words are intended to serve as the kind of “juice” that most real professional web designers will understand what it means.

P.S. Maybe I should consider starting a contest where people get to paste themselves into images of my office and then publish those online on my site as a ‘tribute’ to this AwareBear fool who did so with commercial intentions and total lack of any clues as to why this is a bad idea to do with POPULAR IMAGES. Your ideas on the subject are welcome.

Update 10th November 2008, Information recently received from a reader. The link specified was already taken down shortly after we received this information on Andre Leite Alves.

This guy copied the D&C peoples choice awards page and penciled himself in under best computer store and created another category for himself. To make dumbo even dumber, he placed in his multiple Frontier Yellow Page ads 3 certificates that he was the People’s Choice Awards winner for 2006, 2007, and 2008. Hey Andre, the 2008 awards haven’t even been made yet. The D&C has been notified and isn’t very happy about the stolen graphics and copyrighted content he used, along with his blatant plagiarism and false advertising. Based on his character I expect him to go under, switch names, and get out of paying for his Yellow page Ads, then link to them under a different name and get free advertising out of them. You can see this guy coming a mile away. Only the beginning Andre, run and hide.

Not allow them near your comp. I wouldn’t even allow them near my house. Afraid they’d steal the front door and kitchen sink. He forgot to have his posture modified for that picture. He looks like a couch potatoe in the wrong environment.

You forgot to link in awarebear.com and aacomputersusa.com in your post. You should consider doing that so everyone can see the crap they have on there. I looked them up and am willing to bet something that some of the other pictures on their sites are also “creatively borrowed” if you know what I mean.

Hey Dan. I wouldn’t be surprised either but I intentionally didn’t link in those sites. If you read my blog you can see that my site gets a ton of visitors and sometimes by the tends of thousands in mere hours.

If everyone starts hitting those links it might cripple their sites and I wouldn’t want to be blamed for causing their sites to be unreachable. Of course, one day of my visitor volume directed at those links might be more than they see in a lifetime.

Sorry guys, you know who you are (acki, madmax, phrello), but I moderate comments and while I don’t mind people having a say and expressing their opinions on my site, I do draw a line when profanity gets out of hand and turns into discrimination.

Having known you for nearly 10 years I think I can say that I truly believe you are going to be this guy’s worst nightmare. Or maybe your lawyers. Or maybe Google will be his worst enemy from now on. His name is showing up prominently. 🙂

hella funny post! ha ha this peanut is like the fools on idols. i think if we examine his computer we will find pictures of playboy bunnies with him pasted next to them. not for commercial use but his own personal use tho 🙂

Back in the day we would slam petty thieves and ordinary criminals into the stocks -medieval torture device- and had the whole town place shame on them. Today we have the internet and pitbull law firms!

Roamer: Hey, watch your language there! And there wouldn’t be much room under the desks. He’d get strangled… by cables… or lawyers of which I keep a whole box under there! Peekaboo! Scarier than a Jack-in-the-Box. Not to mention, I wouldn’t want the guy near my parts!! 🙂

Or do you think it would be wise for him to take a picture of himself sitting behind his Asus Eee PC? That also explains why he needed someone else to create the picture for him. Ever tried running Photoshop on the Eee? 🙂

It would indeed be interesting to see a visitor counter on your site to log traffic.
I’m sure many people including me would be interested in seeing how many visitors you get even if you just post figures every so often.

Btw, I am overwhelmed by your pc setup and I have no idea how someone can compare your office setup to that of Al Gore. I would more likely compare it to some of these

I’ll be sure to check up again to see what other pc stuff you’ve bought, it makes me feel very small with my 800MHz AMD athlon web pc (which i’m on now), my 2GHz compaq evo n800w, and the parts for about 8 pc’s including a couple more AMD’s (1.5-1.6Ghz)….

There used to be a little counter at the bottom of the page that sat there for about a year but it wasn’t working correctly. With low traffic it would update fine but with high traffic it would skip counting. On one particularly busy day the real logs showed around 15.000 unique IP hits on the page yet the counter only updated itself by about 2000.

The Al Gore thing… ha, yeah! That wasn’t someone comparing the setup but rather him and me personally. The person was making some odd claims about global warming and how I didn’t care about the environment just like Al Gore and his electricity use.

To make matters worse,this guy copied the D&C peoples choice awards page and penciled himself in under best computer store and created another category for himself. See the link below if it isn’t down yet. We have copied the site in it’s entirety because he probably is taking it down as we write this.http://frontiernet.net/~aalves01/awards/
To make dumbo even dumber, he placed in his multiple Frontier Yellow Page ads 3 certificates that he was the People’s Choice Awards winner for 2006, 2007, and 2008. Hey Andre, the 2008 awards haven’t even been made yet. The D%C has been notifed and isn’t very happy about the stolen graphics and copyrighted content he used, along with his blatant plaguerism and false advertising.
Based on his character I expect him to go under, switch names, and get out of paying for his Yellow page Ads, then link to them under a different name and get free advertising out of them. You can see this guy coming a mile away. Only the beginning Andre, run and hide.

Hiya “going down”. Please contact me. I may have some additional information and perhaps a few questions as well.

You are right about Andre being in hiding. Of course, that may not be a big surprise since my people are looking for him to hand over a little piece of paper in person. The problem with con-artists like him is that they can hide for a while but not forever and I suspect he may be underestimating my determination, or that of the law firm. 🙂

I think I remember seeing this before, not sure. Either way I used to do web design back in 2001 for a very brief period of time and after checking out this guys website it seems that he is clueless about web design. The first page alone is gastly! Every single page afterwards does not follow any kind of design basics. The Apple Repair page seems to be ripped from Apple itself, at the very least more ripped off images and if that is the case he is messing with the WRONG company.

The pages themselves are just images, if you follow the page down that is where the only content this guy has created himself – text. I checked out the page source and yep… a single image, a couple dozen ‘ ‘ and he designs websites? I haven’t seen websites built this bad in a decade! At least not by professionals.

I just looked over his website, and wow. That is some horrible web design work there. One thing that really got me is that, on every page, there is a major space between the graphic content and the text below. I’m using a 19″ LCD at 1280×1024 resolution, and there is enough blank space to actually fill my entire screen, without being able to see any of his content above or below. I thought it may have been a browser translation issue, as I primarily use Firefox, but I tried it in IE7 and it was the same. As already noted, horrible grammar and spelling issues, as well, not to mention a lot of questionable claims regarding “certification” of so-called staff.

Stefan, I love your office, and on my website, I actually do use one of your pictures, but properly credited to you and your site. BTW, will you adopt me? That way I can get my own NASA-inspired computer room?

Anyway, I hope you nail this clown good. He certainly has it coming. What a con-man.

If you really want to see something funny, use his full name and add .com and check that out. Scroll down to read the gibberish text he’s got there. I know what he’s trying to do with that but it isn’t going to work… and he doesn’t understand why it doesn’t work. LOL!

Yup. Gibberish indeed. And no, he has no idea that, or why, it won’t work. It also makes him look even more unprofessional and amateurish than his other stunts already have. People who don’t know anything about writing html and dominating search engines will look at that page and wonder why he is constantly using his full name, and in various ways and combinations. To the average person, his horrible use of grammar simply reveals him to be a total amateur in probably every respect.

They also have images on their site stolen from Alienware and Apple. I started looking into these guys over the summer, checked out their DBA and it was filed in 2006, so to say they’ve been in business for 15 years is ridiculous, they are in their mid 20’s. I posted a negative review on their yahoo local page and they somehow got it removed, and then 2 blatantly fake ones popped up. So I posted another, and they managed to get that removed also.

Stefan — actually, I do think Andre and Arthur are 2 different people and brothers. I believe Arthur graduated from college in 2005. They also refer to each others as coworkers.

Read the D&C choice cached page carefully. He actually seemed to have created his own awards which are “like” the D&C awards and claims to have won that one. So he is not claiming to have won the D&C award, but creating his own and so confusingly referencing the D&C award so people will be confused into thinking he did win it (or is claiming to have.) So it is shady but a slightly different shady than you think.

I cannot believe what a d-bag this guy is. I looked at their web ‘design’ page, and I’ve never been on a more-crappy site before. I imagine all of the portfolio images are stolen too. They look like they’re right out of a template site.

I wonder what his day job is? There’s no-way he makes any money at this shotgun blast of services. Maybe he’s the WalMart Photo Manager. That seems about right.

It’s OK, Evthinbg is clear enough. Don’t take more time talking about this stupid. He doesn’t deserve our attention any longer. Good people deserves that.
Our job talks by ourselves. If someone still believes in selfpromotion… he/she might check his/her brain.
BTW, I admire your job…and, of course, envy your staff.
Best wishes from Spain,
Carlos